by Toranosuke Shimada
English translation by Adrienne Beck
Lyric translation by Jelly Cat
Lettering and cover design by Nicky Lim
Interior layouts by Sandy Grayson
Logo designed by George Panella
Proofreading by Dawn Davis
Edited by Alexis Roberts
Original Japanese language serialization by Kodansha in Morning Monthly Two July 2018-June 2019.
English language publication by Seven Seas Entertainment in November 2021.
. . .
"If I wander about the shore this morning
It will bring me back to good ol' times"
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Humanity constructs intelligent machines as servants, but these robots end up-somewhat accidentally-carrying the spark of our consciousness into the far future. Humanity fell in love with technology even as it fell out of love with the biological world. We built the robots to serve our whims, to create answers to our desires, to serve our truest faith-our desire for immortality-and ended up shaping a product beyond all the cynical/cyclical schemes usually dictated by ideologies of planned obsolescence. The robots of the manga future history Robo Sapiens are built to last for tens of thousands of years. This defeat of product life cycles might be the most fanciful idea expressed by this manga.
The future depicted is vast and tragic, but the tragic elements-global wars, nuclear meltdowns, environmental degradation-are viewed at a remove. The wondrous robots who embody superhuman fantasies are foregrounded, human frailty rests in the middle ground, and human cruelty looms in the background. Robo Sapiens could be described as dystopian, at least in part. I think it's more that dystopia is a thread in the tapestry, if you will. You strip that out and you can still make some sense of the work, but something is clearly missing. The same could be said for the idea of utopia-it's not the whole picture, but you can't just rip that out, either.
Robo Sapiens is episodic. Each chapter seems like a stand alone story or observational vignette. Then characters from earlier chapters return, change, and secrets from the past unfold line by line, memory by memory. We meet a super robot who exists as a friend to all in need-think of a shiny chrome version of Christopher Reeves's Superman-who answers all the prayers and wishes that no deity or devil or genie in a bottle ever could. There's a dutiful caretaker of a massive subterranean nuclear waste storage facility. Early on, we meet one of the last hard-boiled detectives, complete with an old school ass-kicking certain set of skills, even though much of the rest of the narrative consists of interlocking mysteries across numbingly huge expanses of time that defy the efforts of any solitary protagonist to solve.
Much of the narrative, ultimately, is driven by a brilliant but disillusioned roboticist who creates a number of the robot characters in the story. This roboticist has become disenchanted with her fellow humans who fill the world with war and waste, but much of her contempt is expressed obliquely. During a TED Talk style presentation, we see the cruelly caricatured human audience-distracted by screens, badly dressed, ill-mannered, entitled-from her perspective. Interestingly, the robots never seem to absorb this contempt. Maybe it's an Asimov thing: robot minds are programmed to show humans the utmost benevolence. It could be that the disillusioned roboticist has taken a cue from Asimov's Laws of Robotics to prevent her contempt from being replicated inside these newly created minds. Robo Sapiens cleverly chooses to respect the privacy of one of its central figures-this bitter roboticist-and therefore preserves a sense of mystery.
However, the robots are established as having capacious minds capable of downloading vast amounts of human history in an instant, and engaging with that infodump via fully immersive internal simulations. One of the robots is able to walk through a vast swath of human evolutionary history from cave people to present. This historically enriched robot doesn't seem to view humanity in a bad light. Ultra fast robo-brains capable of sophisticated multivariable analysis of vast amounts of historical/evolutionary/psychological/economic/sociological data results, intriguingly, in empathy and tolerance. (Compare and contrast with the sadistic supercomputer conjured up in the Harlan Ellison short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" who uses its vast intelligence and stores of data to inflict eternal punishment upon the last remnants of the human race.)
Robots are also constructed to be romantic mates for humans. This is, if you're wondering, handled in an extremely elliptical fashion. There's no explicit human-on-robot action, but the power dynamics are disturbing. For much of the timeline, robots are totally subject to human power. Even though they show intelligence and individuality, the living machines-designed in the image of humans-have no rights to disobey or resist their human masters. If a human tells a robot to do something-anything-it must comply. If a human desires a gendered robot, then the robot assumes whatever gender expression serves the human's wishes.
As for specific sex acts, Robo Sapiens is, as I said, elliptical. Presumably, anything goes. Later in the narrative, humans seem to grant robots full civil rights including autonomy of thought and action. Later still, humans and robots have separated from each other, with the human population on the decline. Wars are alluded to, and it's possible the humans were defeated by the robots in some global conflagration. The robots don't seem bitter or hostile towards humans, even though the final remnants of homo sapiens do seem to be fearful of the robots. Overall, robo sapiens as a species don't seem to hold on to grudges or vendettas despite their long history of subjugation by humans. It's never completely clear if this easy going attitude on the part of robotkind is a moral stance of not antagonizing a non-threatening group of beings, or if this confidence came about after thoroughly defeating their former masters. Robo Sapiens contains no explicit depictions of warfare, so you kinda have to decide for yourself. It's eerie. It's ambiguous.
The art is curved, rounded, and non-threatening for the most part. There's a strong influence from Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka. Late in the timeline robots choose more imaginative forms, and are no longer bound to resemble their human creators. Writer/artist Toranosuke Shimada's robots evoke a formidable benevolence, as if the gods humanity prayed to for deliverance for countless generations could only be realized by futuristic comic book science.
Robo Sapiens left me with the sense that humanity's yearning for immortality could ironically outlive the species by finding expression in robotic, artificially intelligent beings.
